My European born father was from the old school where the woman raised the children and the man of the house provided the living. These were the days when the breadwinner often worked five and one half or six days a week. Because there was a shift premium and a financial necessity, my dad always worked second shift. Consequently, these factors combined and my sister, Betty, and I grew up in the fifties and sixties in the Cleveland, Ohio area without seeing much of him.
As a student, attending East Cleveland's, Shaw High Technological Institute, I had the typical assortment of friends. Because many of them applied themselves and were college bound, and I was less than a shining star in my graduating class, the journalist wannabes, in my junior year predicted in our high school yearbook that my career destination in life extended no further than being a guard at the local ice skating rink. Four years later, I was a Reactor Operator on the U.S.S. George C. Marshall, one of Admiral Rickover's shiny new Fleet Ballistic Submarines--a position that required extensive schooling that necessitated brain cell alignment and most importantly, an epiphany. |
